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THE
UNFINISHED
PROGRAMME OF
DEMOCRACY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Renascence of Faith
The Highroad to Christ
Christ and Ourselves
Personality and Nationality
The Church in the Commonwealth (New Commonwealth Books)
The Red Cap on the Cross
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE UNFINISHED PROGRAMME OF DEMOCRACY
BY
RICHARD ROBERTS
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
NEW YORK:
B. W. HUEBSCH
Mcmxx
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO “MINE OWN,”
N., P., D., AND G.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY 9
II. THE TESTS OF DEMOCRATIC PROGRESS 39
III. THE PECUNIARY STANDARD 64
IV. THE REDEMPTION OF WORK 93
V. THE ACHIEVEMENT OF LIBERTY 131
VI. THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP 160
VII. THE ORGANISATION OF GOVERNMENT 210
VIII. A DEMOCRATISED WORLD 251
IX. EDUCATION INTO DEMOCRACY 295
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PREFACE
THESE pages embody the attempt of a plain man to thread a way through
the social confusion of our time. The book sets out with a profound
faith in the validity of the democratic principle; and its object is to
trace the path along which the logic of this principle appears to lead.
No claim is made to expert knowledge of economics or political science;
but the writer has endeavoured to acquaint himself with the recent
literature of the subject and to understand the main currents of
prevailing opinion and feeling.
Events are moving so rapidly at the present time that certain passages
became impertinent before the book was finished. It is probable that
before it finally leaves the writer’s hands, other passages may suffer
in the same way. But the main drift of the argument remains unaffected.
* * * * *
No attempt has been made in the body of the book to discuss the methods
by which the social and economic changes which are impending should be
carried through. It has been assumed that in the English-speaking world,
the traditional respect for constitutional processes would avail to
prevent resort to what has come to be known as “direct action.” It is
now clear that this assumption was ill-founded and that there is a
considerable movement of opinion toward industrial or “direct” action.
The writer would venture to state his conviction that recourse to this
method would be unspeakably disastrous and would carry with it
consequences which its present advocates cannot foresee. It will be no
easy task to restore the normal constitutional and economic processes
when once they have been scrapped in the pursuit of some immediate
object; and it is as sure as anything can very well be that the first
step in direct action will have to be followed by others and must end in
a confusion out of which the forty years it took to deliver Israel out
of Egypt would be all too short to extricate us.
At the same time it should in fairness be acknowledged that if organised
labour decides to use this dubious weapon, it will be under great
provocation. The tardiness of governments to fulfil their promises,
their too obvious tenderness toward the vested interests, the blind and
obstinate bourbonism of the privileged classes over against the new
proletarian awakening—all these things combine to create a situation
which labour may feel intolerable and may resolve to end by a summary
process. It is indeed only the most resolute and speedy mobilisation of
all the resources of practical goodwill and reasonableness that can
avert a great catastrophe. Organised labour has proved itself to be
neither vindictive nor unreasonable when it has been met with fair and
square dealing; and if we are plunged into the chaos of a general strike
or perhaps worse, the larger responsibility will rest with those who,
possessed of power and privilege, either could or would not see that the
clock had moved onward a great space—and, during the years of war, with
great rapidity—and so were unwilling or unready to adapt themselves to
the new circumstances.
* * * * *
One subject of fundamental importance is touched upon but incidentally
in these pages—namely, the land. What is said herein concerning property
in general applies with even more point to land; and the plea which is
made for the standardisation of the price of staple commodities clearly
leads to the public ownership of land, which is indeed on every ground
the only reasonable solution of the land question. But adequate
discussion of the matter would carry the argument of the book too far
afield. In these pages, attention is primarily directed to the situation
which has been created by modern industrialism.
* * * * *
The obligations of the writer to friends and writers are legion; it
would be hopeless to enumerate them. Some items of this indebtedness may
be inferred from the footnotes. The writer in particular regrets that
Mr. Laski’s _Authority in the Modern State_ did not fall into his hands
sooner; but he is glad to find himself in substantial agreement with the
argument and conclusions of that notable work.
_Ty’n-y-coed,
Capel Curig,
North Wales._
_July 15th, 1919._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter I.
THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
“What is democracy? Sometimes, it is the name for a form of
government by which the ultimate control of the machinery of
government is committed to a numerical majority of the community.
Sometimes, and incorrectly, it is used to denote the numerical
majority itself, the poor or the multitude existing in a state.
Sometimes, and still more loosely, it is the name for a policy,
directed exclusively or mainly to the advantage of the labouring
class. Finally, in its broadest and deepest, most comprehensive and
most interesting sense, democracy is the name for a certain general
condition of society, having historic origins, springing from
circumstances and the nature of things, not only involving the
political doctrine of popular sovereignty but representing a cognate
group of corresponding tendencies over the whole field of moral,
social and even spiritual life within the democratic
community.”—LORD MORLEY.
“I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of Democracy, By
God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart
of on the same terms.”—WALT WHITMAN.
“To be a democrat is not to decide on a certain form of human
association, it is to learn how to live with other men.”—MARY P.
FOLLETT.
THE inherent logic of the democratic idea calls for a society which will
provide for all its members those conditions of equal opportunity that
are within human control. It denies all forms of special and exclusive
privilege, and affirms the sovereignty of the common man.
In practice, however, democracy has gone no further than the achievement
of a form of government; and in popular discussion the word has usually
a connotation exclusively political. It is even yet but slowly becoming
clear that a democratic form of government is no more than the bare
framework of a democratic society; and democracy as we know it is justly
open to the criticism that it has not seriously taken in hand the task
of clothing the political skeleton with a body of living social flesh.
Modern democracy is, of course, historically very young; and it may be
reasonably maintained that it is premature to speak of its failure to
realise its full promise. Nevertheless, it is of some consequence that
already that part of the democratic programme which has been achieved
and put to the proof is being exposed to heavy fire of destructive
criticism. During the past few years, we have become familiar with the
idea of a world made safe for democracy; and in the minds of many people
democracy (which in this connection means representative popular
government) stands as a sort of ultimate good which it is impious to
challenge or to criticise. Yet this democracy, for which the world has
been presumably made safe at so great and sorrowful a price, is by some
roundly declared to be radically unsafe for the world and a hindrance to
social progress. The syndicalists, for instance, believe the democratic
state to be no more than the citadel of bourgeois and plutocratic
privilege, and have decreed its destruction, proposing to substitute for
it a modified anarchism. Others, like Paul Bourget and Brunetiere, so
far from finding it the sanctuary of the privileged, fear it as a source
of anarchy and social confusion, and invite us to retrace our steps to
happier days when authority being less diffused was more speedily and
effectually exercised. Neither the syndicalist nor the authoritarian
criticism is wholly baseless; yet it is true that in neither case does
it arise from an inherent defect in the democratic principle. The one
arises from the circumstance that political democracy still lacks its
logical economic corollary; the other from the fact that democracy is
not sustained by its proper ethical coefficient.
These, however, are not the only grounds for the increasing scepticism
of the validity of democratic institutions. The democratic state, like
its predecessors, has proved itself to be voracious of authority; and in
the exercise of its presumed omnicompetency it has increasingly occupied
itself with matters, which—both in respect of extent and content—it is
incapable of handling adequately. It has become palpably impossible to
submit all the concerns of government to parliamentary discussion; and
in consequence there has been a tendency on the one hand to invest
administrative departments with virtual legislative power, and on the
other to convert representative assemblies into mere instruments for
registering the decisions of the executive government. The recent
proposal for the establishment of a permanent statutory National
Industrial Council in England has been evoked by the palpable inability
of Parliament to deal effectually with the problems of industrial
production. Even before the War, it was becoming plain that the
congestion of parliamentary business in England called for some drastic
remedy if parliament was to be saved from futility and discredit. But
here again, the failure has been due to no inherent defect in the
democratic principle but rather to the fact that the unitary and
absolutist doctrine and practice of the state has hindered the proper
development of democracy.
In a word, the trouble with democracy is that there is not enough of it.
The remedy for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Politically, it
is still incomplete; its economic applications have yet to be made; and
while we do lip service to its ethical presuppositions, they are far
from being a rule of life. Yet lacking these things, democracy is
condemned to arrest, and through arrest to decay.
Meantime the dynastic principle has fallen—has indeed fallen under
circumstances which make its revival seem exceedingly remote.
Nevertheless, if democracy suffers arrest at this point in its history,
if the peoples fail to work out its logic, society may lapse into an
anarchy out of which dynasticism or something like it may once more
emerge. It is no hyperbole to speak of the crisis of democracy; and it
is only to be saved as the democratic peoples set themselves earnestly
to the business of strengthening its stakes and lengthening its cords.
I
Few British people of liberal mind are able to look back upon that
period of their history which gathers around the Boer War without a
certain humiliation. Professor L. T. Hobhouse ascribes the popular
defection of the British people from the democratic principle and temper
during that time to four causes: (_a_) the decay of profound and vivid
religious belief; (_b_) the diffusion of a stream of German idealism
“which has swelled the current of retrogression from the plain
rationalistic way of looking at life and its problems,” and which has
stimulated the growth of the doctrine of the absolute state and its
imperialistic corollaries; (_c_) the career of Prince Bismarck, and
(_d_) “by far the most potent intellectual support of the reaction ...
the belief that physical science has given its verdict (for it came to
this) in favour of violence against social justice.” This provides us
with an instance (so plain that another were superfluous) of the
inability of an unfulfilled democratic order to resist alien and hostile
influences that may be “in the air,” and of its consequent perversion to
ends which belie its own first principles. It is the permanent danger of
democracy when it is not sustained and inspired by a generous moral
impulse to be prostituted to undemocratic ends. “It is at best” (to
quote Mr. Hobhouse again) “an instrument with which men who hold by the
ideal of social justice and human progress can work; but when these
ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base
uses.” Lord Morley, with a similar sensitiveness to the perils of
democracy asks whether we mean by it “a doctrine or a force;
constitutional parchment or a glorious evangel; perfected machinery for
the wire-puller, the party-tactician, the spoils-man and the boss, or
the high and stern ideals of a Mazzini or a Tolstoi.” It may, indeed, be
reasonably held that worse has befallen it than Lord Morley’s fears. We
have evidence how frequently democracy has in practice become the tool
of strong and unscrupulous men and gangs of such men seeking selfish and
corrupt ends; and how, for Lincoln’s famous formula, we have had
government of the people by a well-to-do oligarchy in the interest of
the privileged classes.
Nor have we any guarantee against this kind of degradation and
degeneracy except in the perpetual reaffirmation and revitalising of the
spiritual and moral grounds of democracy. It may indeed be possible to
create political safeguards against the exploitation of the people and
their government in the interest of individuals and classes; but there
is no such safeguard against democracy, as it were, exploiting itself
for undemocratic ends or sinking into undemocratic practices except in
its continued education in the purposes for which it exists, in its
extension into every region of life, and in its repeated solemn
submission of itself to its principles and ideals. Until democracy
becomes and is felt to be a personal and collective vocation, it is
forever liable to corruption and apostasy. Democracy can only live and
thrive while men remain sincerely and consciously democratic. Liberty
and Equality are doubtful and precarious boons, and may—as they often
have—become positive dangers without Fraternity. Democracy without its
appropriate moral coefficient must be a vain and short-lived thing. So
long as, while professing to give a fair field to every man, it does no
more than provide an open field for the strong man, it will inevitably
lead to the exploitation of the multitude and to the creation of new
forms of privilege; and that in the main has been its recent history.
Not less than by the loss or the absence of moral impulse, is democracy
endangered by ignorance or forgetfulness of what it exists for. Two
words are usually taken to describe the characteristics of democracy,
_liberty_ and _equality_; and the atmosphere of a particular democracy
depends upon whether it lays the larger emphasis on one or on the other
of these. In England, for instance, the type is libertarian. The Briton
has cared less for political equality than for what he calls freedom,
the right of self-determination, the opportunity to live out his own
life in his own way. He has been less doctrinaire than his French
neighbours and has not been much troubled by the logical anomaly of an
aristocracy so long as the aristocracy left him reasonable elbow-room.
When the aristocracy was found to be obstructive, its pretensions were
suitably abridged. In general, the idea of formal equality has played a
less important part in England than it has in France or the United
States. Democracy in the two latter countries is more specifically
egalitarian. This difference is, however, mainly a difference of stress
upon two aspects of the same thing, the egalitarian emphasis having to
do with the formal status of the citizen, the libertarian with the
personal independence which should belong to the status.
Yet the inadequate co-ordination of the two ideas may, and indeed does,
lead to certain unhappy consequences. In Great Britain, an insufficient
attention to equality has led to a too prolonged survival of the idea of
a “governing class”; and social prestige still possesses an inordinate
influence upon the distribution of political power. In France, on the
other hand, an insufficient stress on liberty has tended to make
Frenchmen _étatistes_. According to Emile Faguet, they are accustomed to
submit to despotism and are eager in turn to practise it. They are
liberals only when they are in a minority. In the United States,
egalitarianism produces a kind of compulsory uniformitarianism. It is
significant that, while in a state of war all nations are intolerant of
dissent and free discussion, in the United States where the doctrine of
political equality has reached its completest expression, dissent from
the common view has been much more harshly treated than in any other
belligerent country. The cardinal sin appears to be that of breaking the
ranks. Liberty, according to Lord Acton, is “the assurance that every
man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against
the influence of authority and majorities, custom, and opinion;” and if
that be true, it does not necessarily follow that democracy is the home
of liberty. An egalitarian democracy may indeed become the tomb of
liberty. “Democracy,” says the same learned authority, “no less than
monarchy or aristocracy sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and
strives with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot
attain to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance
and deviation, and to secure by plebiscite, referendum, or caucus, free
play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle that
none shall have power over the people is taken to mean that none shall
be able to restrain or to evade its power; the true democratic principle
that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken
to mean that it shall not be required to tolerate what it does not like.
The true democratic principle that every man’s free-will shall be as
unfettered as possible is taken to mean that the free will of the
sovereign people shall be fettered in nothing.... Democracy claims to be
not only supreme, without authority above, but absolute, without
independence below, to be its own master and not a trustee. The old
sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new one, who may be
flattered and deceived but whom it is impossible to corrupt or to
resist; and to whom must be rendered the things that are Cæsar’s, and
also the things that are God’s.” Democracy appeared in order to deliver
the individual from a dehumanising subjection; but it may become a
dehumanising tyranny itself. A sovereign people may become as harsh and
merciless as a sovereign lord.
The democratic idea is the corollary of the doctrine of the equal
intrinsic worth of every individual soul. The modern democratic movement
has started from a recognition of this principle; and the principle is
meaningless unless it implies the prescriptive right of the individual
to self-determination. Lord Acton’s definition of liberty is inadequate
because he approaches it from the standpoint of one who was in a
permanent religious minority in his own country, and in a permanent
intellectual minority in his church. Liberty is surely the assurance
that a man may have full opportunity to live out his own life and to
grow to the full stature of his manhood, to be true to himself through
everything. This requires the recognition of real personal independence
and a definite minimum of obligatory uniformity. In another connection,
Acton insists that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it
is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good
public administration that it is required, but for security in the
pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” It
is so frequently assumed that the function of government is the
establishment and preservation of order that it is well to remember that
it is a comparatively easy thing to secure some kind of order. The real
difficulty is to establish and to secure liberty. We are far too ready
to assume that liberty is capable of looking after itself and that the
fragile plant which needs our solicitude is social order. But liberty
stands in jeopardy every hour, not less in a democracy than in an
autocracy. And in so far as a democracy, which was born of the craving
for liberty fails to preserve and to extend liberty, it proves itself
bankrupt.
And just as democracy is only made safe from corruption and
subordination to undemocratic ends by repeated solemn affirmation of its
moral and spiritual foundations, so it is only made safe from declining
into absolutism and tyranny by constant return upon its metaphysical
centre—the sanctity of the individual. In the modern world, the
multitude is not in danger; our chief pre-occupation must be to save the
individual from being swamped by the multitude. We are apt not to see
the trees for the wood; we must be for ever reminding ourselves that the
wood is made up of the trees. Democracy that tends to authority and
uniformity is foreordained to decay; the democracy of life is one of
freedom and infinite variety. Democracy has yet to solve the problem of
setting the individual free without opening the door to individualism
and anarchy.
II
It may be with some reason pleaded that the defects of modern democracy
spring from the conditions under which it emerged as a historical fact.
It has appeared with an aspect altogether too negative, as though the
abolition of monarchy or aristocracy or any form of privilege were
sufficient to bring it to birth. The democratic principle has
implications which are not exhausted with the destruction of autocracy
or aristocracy or even with the formal affirmation of popular
sovereignty and the institution of a universal and equal franchise.
Historically, democracy is the product, direct or indirect, of popular
risings against political privilege whether vested in a person or in a
class. Probably we should have to seek a still anterior cause in the
power of economic exploitation which political power confers upon him
who holds it. The mainspring of revolution is the sense of
disinheritance rendered intolerable by injustice and exploitation and
the consequent demand of the disinherited class for its appointed share
in the common human inheritance of light and life. But the tragedy of
revolution (despite the conventional historical judgment) is that it has
never gone far enough. The records of revolution are filled chiefly with
its negative and destructive performances because its impulse, not
having been sustained by an adequate social vision, ran out before it
completed its work or before it could swing on to the business of
construction. It was too readily assumed that the one thing needful was
to break down the one palpable disabling barrier of privilege. That
done, the rest would follow; the golden age would at once materialise.
But it has never done so. It was not perceived that the logic of
revolution required and pointed to a sequel of positive and creative
social action.
This was essentially Lamennais’ plea in 1831. A revolution, he told his
fellow countrymen, is only the beginning of things. You have cleared the
ground; upon that cleared ground, you have to raise the fabric of a
living society. France did, indeed, already provide the instance of the
danger of an uncompleted revolution. The political equality established
by the Revolution of 1789, was intended to give a fair field to every
man; but because it went no further, in effect it opened the door to the
strong man. The strong man appeared presently in the person of Napoleon;
and with Napoleon came the Empire and all that that episode cost Europe
in blood and treasure. The same kind of miscarriage (in another region
and on a larger scale) has befallen the wider historical development of
the French Revolution. Because it was not seen that the “natural right”
of property might no less than the “divine right” of noble birth become
a source of disinheritance, the door was opened to a movement which in
the nineteenth century produced a new type of privilege and a new manner
of disinheritance. That Jack’s vote has been declared to be as good as
his master’s has not saved Jack from an exploitation as real and
burdensome as that under which his father groaned. But it is of a
different kind. The older disability was chiefly agrarian; the new is
industrial. The doctrine of political liberty (interpreted in the light
of Adam Smith) received an economic translation in the doctrine of
“laissez-faire”; and this combined, first, with the restrictions imposed
upon the power of the territorial aristocracy, second, with the new
commercial civilisation which began at the Industrial Revolution, and
third, with the advantage with which the propertied classes, especially
the rich merchant class, started in the new order, has brought about a
new kind of disability. The common people have exchanged the old master
for a new, a feudal aristocracy for an industrial plutocracy, land
barons for trade barons; they have been released from agrarian serfdom
only to be tied to the wheel of industrial wage-slavery. Political
emancipation did not bring with it real freedom.
It was characteristic of Lamennais’ insight that he saw that political
liberty without safeguards against economic exploitation would prove a
vain thing. Writing to the working men of Paris in 1847, he said that,
with them he “should demand that in accordance with justice and reason,
the question should be gone into, how it is possible, in the
distribution of the fruits of labour, to do away with the revolting
anomalies which crush under their weight the most numerous portion of
the human family.”[1] Emile Faguet justly observes that Lamennais saw
that the coming enemy was “_le pouvoir d’argent_,” and that he did what
he could to choke it off before it could establish itself. Nor was
Lamennais alone in his sense of the inadequacy of political change to
meet the needs of the common people. Robert Owen reached a similar
conclusion, and, indeed, was so sceptical of the value of political
action for social improvement that during one period of his life he
preached outright to the working classes a doctrine of political
indifferentism. The working-class movements which came into being early
in the nineteenth century—the Co-operative Societies and the Trade
Unions—originated in the need of countervailing the economic
disadvantage under which the new order had placed the worker and which
the endeavour to establish political equality and liberty had been
powerless to prevent. The growth of Socialism and Syndicalism represents
a revolt from a social order in which the privilege of noble birth has
been superseded by the privilege of property, and the disinherited class
has but suffered a new disinheritance.
Footnote 1:
This view was shared by Mazzini, whose gospel was at many points
identical with that of Lamennais. See _The Duties of Man_, ch. xi.
It is by now abundantly evident that the next stage in the evolution of
democracy will consist of a movement of the proletarian masses to remove
the economic disabilities under which they believe themselves to be
suffering. The revolutionary movement in Europe is directed not only
against the dynastic tradition but against the modern institution of
private capitalism; and while the influences of change that have now
overwhelmed Russia and Germany were afoot long before the war, it is not
to be questioned that their liberation was due to the War. Beneath the
outward calm of empire there was a seething mass of unrest; and once the
crust of empire was cracked, this lava of human passion rushed through.
The worker has come to believe that the origins of the war are to be
traced to economic causes, direct products of the capitalist system of
industry, which is also the source of his disabilities in times of
peace; and whether in peace or in war, the worker has at last to pay the
bill. It is not to the point here to discuss whether the premises from
which the worker argues or the conclusions he has reached are valid or
not. We are concerned only to note the state of the case at the present
moment. We observe that the failure of dynastic imperialism has become
the occasion of economic revolution; and in this circumstance we are to
look for the clue to the course of the democratic movement in the
immediate future.
The movement seems indeed to be historically due. The first great
turning point in modern history was the Protestant Reformation with its
insistence upon religious liberty as against ecclesiastical authority.
The second turning point was the French Revolution, which was the first
act in the drama of establishing political liberty as against the power
of aristocracy. It may well turn out that the Russian Revolution marks
the beginning of the third crisis in the modern period, the first act in
the drama of economic emancipation. The Protestant Reformation affirmed
the liberty of the layman against a privilege resting upon an alleged
monopoly of the means of grace; the French Revolution affirmed the
liberty of the citizen against privilege resting upon the fact of noble
birth; the Revolution now in progress will affirm the liberty of the
worker as against privilege resting upon the presumed rights of
property. Perhaps we are about to realise the long delayed economic
corollary of the French Revolution.
Several circumstances of war-experience have given a powerful stimulus
to the movement for radical economic change. Before the war, men were
still haunted by the fear that the revolutionary changes advocated by
the more advanced spirits might turn out to be a transition from the
frying pan into the fire. But the cynical readiness of the “big
business” interests in all the belligerent countries to turn the
nation’s necessity to their own advantage; and the now demonstrated
incompetency and wastefulness of the system of private capitalist
enterprise have served to remove from among the workers any lingering
sense that the good of the nation is bound up with the existing
industrial order. In Great Britain in particular the close industrial
organisation required by the war has provided a revelation of hitherto
unexplored and even unsuspected possibilities of production, proving
“big” business to have been uncommonly bad business. The immense
increase of output in all industries, through the proper co-ordination
and standardisation of processes, the systematic use of scientific
investigation, and the more adequate oversight of the physical condition
of the workers has made it plain that private capitalism either would
not or could not make proper use of the productive resources of the
British people. For instance, the ignorant opposition of the average
employer to the movement for reducing the hours of labour has convicted
him of a stupid incapacity to handle men, especially in view of such
findings as those recorded by Lord Henry Bentinck, who shows
conclusively (from data drawn from the engineering, printing and textile
trades) that “in every case in which experiments have been tried, the
result in output has been favourable to a shortening of the working
day.”[2]
Footnote 2:
_Contemporary Review_, February, 1918.
Moreover, the war-time emphasis upon the idea of democracy has greatly
stimulated the demand for its extension into the field of industry. This
demand was assuming definite shape before the war; but what was at that
time the propaganda of a comparatively small group has now become the
faith of a multitude; and this faith is becoming more and more
articulate as a demand for a socially intensive as well as
geographically extensive application of the democratic principle. The
argument runs in some such fashion as this. Broadly speaking, the
democratic idea has three notes; first, the institution of those
conditions of equal opportunity which are within human control; second,
the participation of the community as a whole in the creation of these
conditions, which means a universal franchise and equal ungraded
partnership in affairs; and third, the absence of any privileged class
which is able to impose its will upon the rest or any part of the rest.
Some rough approximation to this state of things has been made in the
political region; there it is accounted good and right. Why, then should
not the same process be good and right in other regions of life? For
instance, the greater part of a man’s life gathers around and is
governed by his work; yet this democratic principle which is so
estimable in politics is taboo in industry. To begin with, there is no
such thing as a condition of equal opportunity in the industrial region.
Certain antecedent advantages of birth, possession, and education have
created a privileged class; and the rest are under a corresponding
handicap. There was a time when the ranker could rise out of the ranks
and make a field for himself; but in these days of trusts, combines,
chain-stores and the like, the opportunity of the ranker to quit the
ranks has dwindled almost to vanishing point. In the second place,
industry is under class government. The persons engaged in it are
divided into masters and servants, employers and employees; and the
hired man has hardly a word to say in determining the conditions of his
work. The only freedom he possesses lies in the choice of a master; and
even this, under the régime of large corporations, is steadily
disappearing. For the rest, he is confined to a choice between working
under conditions imposed by the employer and not working at all, which
means starvation. In industry there is a rule of privilege as real as
that of the old territorial aristocracy; and the modern practice of
investment has served to perpetuate this privilege within the bounds of
a single class by the simple operation of the accident of birth, just as
feudal landownership in another age became the foundation of
aristocratic power. The one qualification which requires to be made here
is that the concentration of large multitudes of workers in urban
centres, as the result of the machine industry, has enabled the workers
to join together in self-defence; and the Trade Union has to some extent
mitigated the insolence of plutocratic power.
The argument, however, does not end here. It proceeds to the analysis of
the causes of this privilege; and it finds it in the doctrine of
property-rights. It would take us too far afield to trace this doctrine
to its origins. Apparently the French thinkers who laid the train of the
Revolution believed that the “natural right” of property was the
necessary check upon the natural right of freedom; but they could not
foresee the developments of the Industrial Revolution. Otherwise it is
questionable whether they would have found the solution of their problem
so easy. For it is not open to argument that the presumed sanctity of
property rights has, under the conditions created by the Industrial
Revolution furnished the foundation of the modern capitalist order and
its corollaries. The capitalist owes his power to his possession of
property in the shape of industrial plant or of money. Yet it is plain
to anyone who analyses the position with any degree of realism that the
mere possession of a number of things should no more entitle or enable
an individual to lord it over his fellows than an inheritance of blue
blood. Nevertheless, in point of cold fact, that is the present
position; there is, however, a prospect that the divine right of
property may presently go the same way as the divine right of kings.
But it will go not under the pressure of a theory. It will disappear
under the strain of economic necessity. In England the proposal of a
“levy on capital” has been widely and seriously discussed. It is
asserted that it will be impossible to raise by taxation a revenue
sufficient to pay the interest on the war debt after providing for
indispensable national services; and there appears to be no way out of
this _impasse_ save by making a levy upon the accumulated wealth of the
country. A levy equal to the debt would require to take something like
two-fifths of the estimated total of the private capital. The methods by
which this might be done do not now concern us; nor does it matter very
much for our argument that the industrial and commercial magnates, and
the _ancien régime_ economists are declaiming vehemently against it.
Even the fact that the levy may not be carried out in the form now
advocated is not of great moment. What is important is that the serious
discussion evoked by the proposal has shown that the traditional
doctrine of property-rights is in liquidation. There has not been, so
far as the present writer has been able to discover, any lifting-up of
hands in horror at this suggestion of a sacrilegious invasion upon this
ancient sanctity; the discussion has been conducted on the plane of
expediency and utility. This marks a very considerable movement—for to
many, the Reform Bill of 1831 looked like the end of the world, since it
was (as a politician of the time said) “a maxim that every government
which tends to separate property from constitutional government must be
liable to perpetual revolution.”[3] Property was the chief cornerstone
of the social structure; and even as late as 1888, Lord Acton wrote to
Mr. Gladstone that he hears that “the skilled artisans of London are
hostile to the clergy but not to property,” which latter circumstance he
plainly regards as a sign of grace. Yet to-day, under the exigencies of
public need, it is seriously discussed whether the state should not lay
its hands on anything up to a half of the private wealth of the country.
Footnote 3:
Quoted in Laski, _Problems of Sovereignty_, p. 70—note.
This is essentially a return to the view of a saner age. The mediæval
doctrine was that right in property was not absolute, but that it was of
the nature of a trust. This is the view that underlies the project of a
levy. Professor Hobhouse draws a distinction between “property for use”
and “property for power.” The right to possess property can hardly be
denied. It is essential to a man’s freedom and growth that he should
have absolute control over a certain number of things. But it should be
restricted to what is necessary for personal freedom and growth. A man
may have, that is, property for use but not for power. He may not have
so much property as would enable him to control or virtually to own the
life and labour of others. It is to some such doctrine of property as
this that the mind of progressive labour is tending. Property is in
prospect of socialisation; and perhaps only such socialised property
will in future be available as capital. Under economic pressure, the
doctrine of property is being ethicised; and to ethicise the doctrine is
simply to declare property to be wholly subordinate to social ends.
The first step in modern democracy was the socialisation of political
power; the second without which the first cannot be complete, will be
the socialisation of economic power.
III
We should, however, be deluding ourselves if we suppose that radical
economic change will of itself bring about the kind of world that we
want. The miscarriage which has followed political revolution in the
past may no less disastrously follow economic revolution. Economic
change is of itself powerless to secure us from the appearance of new
types of privilege; and there is not a little danger that the present
tendencies of some advanced thought may lead to bureaucratic government.
Between a proletarian bureaucracy and an industrial plutocracy there is
little to choose; and the tyranny of the expert may become as galling as
that of a despot. “In the socialistic presentment,” says Professor
Hobhouse, “the expert sometimes looks strangely like the powers that
be—in education for instance, a clergyman under a new title, in business
that very captain of industry who at the outset was the socialist’s
chief enemy. Be that as it may, as the expert comes to the front and
efficiency becomes the watchword of administration, all that was human
in socialism vanishes out of it. Its tenderness for the losers in the
race, its protests against class-tyranny, its revolt against commercial
materialism, all the sources of inspiration under which socialist
leaders have faced poverty and prison, are gone like a dream and instead
of them we have a conception of society as a perfect piece of machinery,
pulled by wires radiating from a single centre, and all men are either
experts or puppets. Humanity, Liberty, Justice are expunged from the
banner and the single word _efficiency_ replaces them.” This is, indeed,
a sufficiently dismal prospect, for which it is hardly worth while to
change our present state. It should be said, however, that this
particular peril is greatly minimised by the current emphasis upon
democratic control in industry. The danger remains real notwithstanding.
Nor is it the only danger inherent in a purely economic change. Indeed,
it may be questioned whether any economic change has elements of
permanence, while it is only economic.
The word _efficiency_ betrays the mind of the age which gave it its
current connotation. It was a machine-governed mind; and mechanistic
conceptions of life and progress are from the nature of the case
unfriendly to the democratic spirit. The appearance of the “efficiency
engineer” showed the low estate into which man had fallen—man made once
a little lower than the angels but now treated as a little lower than
the machine. The business of efficiency engineering was the closer
subordination of the man to the machine by methods alleged to be
scientific. Nothing could show more plainly than this does the absence
of that broad humanism which is the very breath of democracy; and even
the generous intention of the socialist ideal was vitiated by the
mechanistic character of socialist doctrine. Statecraft itself became an
affair of efficiency-engineering on a large scale; and the logic of the
mechanistic habit of thought reached its fine flower in the merciless
regimentation of the German people and the enthronement of the “Great
God Gun.” From this pernicious heresy, we may hopefully expect that
reflection on our war-experience may deliver us. Already there are
manifest signs of a reaction to a healthier and kindlier conception of
life and its meaning. The excessive and artificial centralisation of
power in the State is being challenged by a demand for the revival of
regional culture and such a redistribution of the functions of
government as a recognition of the “region” would require.[4] The
business of “unscrambling” the egg, will indeed be long and difficult;
but it is clear that any advance in the essential humanities is bound up
with a release of life from the artificial integrations forced upon it
by the machine civilisation. Mr. Delisle Burns has shown us that the
essential note of Greek life was its sociability;[5] and this is indeed
a pole to which normal human nature ever swings true. But in the Greek
city, sociability was vitiated and ultimately destroyed by the tragic
schism of a slave-system; while in modern civilisation it has been
poisoned by the dominion of the machine. The swamping of the “region” by
the state has enfeebled the natural social bonds of a less sophisticated
age; and somehow or other democracy must thread its way back to a
simpler and more spontaneous sociability. For the artificial synthesis
of “the individual and the state,” we must restore the natural order of
“myself and my neighbours.”
Footnote 4:
Upon this subject, see _The Coming Polity_, by Geddes and Branford.
(Williams and Norgate.)
Footnote 5:
In his _Greek Ideals_.
But we have travelled so far from the simple amenities of the “region”
and our minds have become so sophisticated in artificial and mechanical
modernity that our recovery must begin in something akin to a spiritual
renewal, in a new perception of essential human values. Economic change
will not deliver us from the mechanistic obsession; and we shall only be
saved from the inherent dangers of economic change under present
conditions by a fresh recognition of the central principle of democracy.
That every soul has equal worth carries with it the corollary that
personality must be conceived as an end in itself and not merely as a
means. It is our quarrel with the Junker classes wherever we find them,
that they deliberately relegate large masses of their fellowmen into a
sub-human category. Democracy is the direct denial of this posture. It
affirms on the contrary that every man has a prescriptive right to stand
on his feet unashamed, and to have full opportunity to become the whole
man he may be. It ascribes to him certain liberties and a certain
inalienable status among his fellows; and the employer who regards his
men as “hands” denies democracy as directly as does the autocrat who
regards his subjects as serfs or cannonfodder. In other words, democracy
requires a specific type of personal relationship between men; and
perhaps, its troubles are chiefly due to the fact that while it preached
liberty and equality with no uncertain sound, it neglected to lay a
corresponding emphasis upon fraternity. In truth, democracy is beset
more perilously and more persistently by the inward enemy than the foe
without—the inner enemy that lurks in men’s souls. For though there be a
democrat in every man, there is also a potential aristocrat. The
ultimate battle-ground of the democratic ideal is in men’s hearts. After
the external enemies of democracy are defeated on land and on sea,
democracy will have to go on fighting for its life in our souls. In this
as in all things else, “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”
The personal practice of democracy is comparatively simple, as its
central doctrine is. The equal worth of souls does not of course imply
equal capacity; nor does the fact of unequal natural capacity do away
with the truth of equal worth. It simply indicates the kind of world we
live in. It is a world in which capacity is the measure not of worth but
of obligation; and the law of life is mutual service. In one of the very
few political allusions which Jesus made, He stated this point with much
plainness. “Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them
and they that have authority over them are called ‘benefactors’” (as it
was in the beginning, and has been ever since, when autocrats and their
like have conceded to their subjects some fragment of the natural rights
of which they have despoiled them and then have posed as “benefactors,”
and when imperialists talk of conferring their peculiar _Kultur_ on the
“lesser breeds without the law”), “but,” said Jesus, “it shall not be so
among you. He that is greatest among you, let him be the servant of
all.” This is the authentic democratic spirit and the personal practice
without which democracy cannot live.
It is not enough to pay lip service to democratic ideals—the sanctity of
personality and the obligation of mutual service; or even to accept them
in a spirit of pious sentimentalism. That kind of thing is already
common enough. To the idealistic temper, we must attach the pragmatic
habit, and translate our doctrines into concrete programmes of
emancipation and co-operation. The city of God is not to be built with
good intentions. Fraternity must be rendered into a polity. Yet even
fraternity may perish in formality except it be sustained by a living
brotherliness. _It is the spirit that quickeneth._ Democracy like every
living thing must either grow or decay. If it stops at a political form
or an economic scheme, then it must decline and die. It is only as its
essential spirit captures our consciences and wills and its central
principle is consistently and continuously applied that it can survive
the perversity of our nature and the vicissitudes of history. It must
become a crusade and a holy war.
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